The Reception for New Members & First-time Attendees – Wednesday, 20 March 3:30pm-5pm.

Hear from TESOL volunteer leadership and staff. Ask questions directly to TESOL’s president and executive director.Meet veteran members of TESOL and listen to their helpful suggestions on how to navigate the convention and TESOL. Connect with other attendees and share your thoughts about TESOL and the international convention. Win something! A drawing will be held at the end of the reception for some special TESOL prizes.

Session Summary: Understanding undergraduate (UG) students’ perceptions of ITAs is invaluable in developing effective ITA education programs. However, understanding the relationship that exists between UGs’ perceptions of ITAs and the majors of the UGs can inform ITA educators to further enhance ITA education programs.

Session Summary: How can we better understand how our TESOL teacher education programs are impacting future teachers? In this study, TESOL master’s program students give voice--through surveys, interviews, and reflexive assignments--to their own understandings of their transformations to TESOL educators as they moved through their program and into teaching careers.

Session Summary: This presentation differentiates between communicative and intercultural communicative competence and describes an intercultural communication course to illustrate the means by which teacher educators and course developers can create curricula to meet the needs of TESOL teachers to help them prepare themselves and their students for a range of intercultural interactions.

Session Summary: This session explores issues and challenges related to advising resident multilingual writers in secondary and postsecondary contexts, illustrating the important role that TESOL/composition specialists can play in helping these students navigate the college advising process. Presenters share their research findings and propose strategies for more equitable and effective advising.

Session Summary: What is your journey as an international graduate student? Have you experienced any conflict between you and your committee chair? How would you and/or your chair handle it? This discussion provides graduate students with an avenue to share their understanding of the conflict and the solutions to this significant issue.

Session Summary: With the growing number of non-native speakers pursuing graduate degrees in English around the world, the need for comprehensive, sustained, and effective support for them has become visible and urgent. What kinds of instruction, help, and advocacy do ESL graduate students need, and how can universities best provide them?

Session Summary: As research on academic writing continues to evolve in exciting directions and to influence EAP writing instruction, the need for newer materials has grown. In response, the “Academic Writing for Graduate Students” textbook has been revised to better support students and instructors. Come learn more about the third edition.

Session Summary: This presentation reviews the findings of a semester-long case study examining the reading and writing experiences of an international doctoral student in the United States in her ESL writing course and PhD courses. Pedagogical implications for ESL courses (e.g., use of corpora and genre analysis) and teacher training are discussed.

Summary Session: Incorporating scholarly source material into research writing is a daunting task, especially for non-native writers. An effective technique for organizing sources, improving analysis and synthesis, and avoiding plagiarism is using journal article summary sheets. These sheets can benefit both students and instructors in a research writing course.